Obama's bureaucratic generals: inside the lives of the agency heads who actually run the federal government.

• Author: Donahue, John D.
• Position: ON POLITICAL BOOKS - What Government Does: How Political Executives Manage - Book review

What Government Does: How Political Executives Manage

by Paul R. Lawrence and Mark A Abramson

Rowman & Littlefield, 1966 pp.

Deputy Secretary David Hayes walked into the Interior Department building on April 21, 2010, believing that the day would be noteworthy mostly for that evening's celebration of his daughter's eighteenth birthday. Instead, his Wednesday- morning routine was shattered by the news that the Deepwater Horizon oil rig had exploded, killing eleven workers and imperiling the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. Hayes and a staffer dashed to the airport without so much as a toothbrush or a ticket, somehow persuading the airline crew to open the door of a Gulf-bound flight. It would be September before Hayes would have a day that was not dominated by the disaster. The damage from the Deepwater spill was grave enough as it was--but it would have been worse without Hayes's obsessive efforts to cap the spill and accelerate the cleanup.

Hayes's story is one of many tales of bureaucratic derring-do told in What Government Does: How Political Executives Manage, by management consultants Paul R. Lawrence and Mark A. Abramson. Alas, this important and admirably well-crafted volume is likely destined for meager sales (conceivably even lower than those of my books). Every American has a stake in what government does and how political executives manage; few Americans, however, have enough of an interest to read through a granular-level, interview-based book on the subject. But more of us should, and I would be delighted as well as surprised to see this fine book top the best- seller lists.

What Government Does starts with a concise overview of "the job of the political executive"--that distinctive set of imperatives faced by leaders who must wrangle with the operational challenges of getting things done, and the political challenges of determining what should be done and left undone when (as is almost always the case) capacity falls drastically short of requirements. Lawrence and Abramson postulate a set of generic tasks this work involves: assessing the organization; strengthening the organization; obtaining mission alignment; developing strong processes; mastering metrics and measuring progress; building relationships; enhancing credibility and visibility; and fostering innovation. Stated in the abstract, of course, this to-do list seems pretty obvious, but that doesn't mean any element of it is unimportant or anything but fiendishly hard to pull...